Joy Ride

I enter a large restroom no horizon in the distance, look for a stall, climb into a car. They’re always occupied, you say, your face in the rearview mirror. I don’t believe I know you, but you’re in my car. A car you’ve found in someone else’s story, but you can drive—can’t you— to a city beside a frozen river, cactus country, Provençal—land of poetry and myth. You’ve begun to sound like a gangster, my French is poor, waters to cross and did I mention I have to pee. Two boys walk by, pick up her voice its accent, mimic her words, punch one another, laugh and walk away. You’re in the seat beside me now, older and beginning to fade, and when I look again a slight depression in the cushion’s all that’s left of you. The pedal has found my foot and the car begins to accelerate—

Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. A second collection, If We are the Forest the Animals Dream, also from Sixteen Rivers, appeared in 2025. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County (WordTemple Press). Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.